


One Of Us

by blue_spruce



Category: Political RPF - US 21st c.
Genre: 2016 US Presidential Election, F/F, Gen, Hope, Resistance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_spruce/pseuds/blue_spruce
Summary: Sharp pin in a woman’s heart, the thought of what might have been.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abluestocking](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abluestocking/gifts).



“Sometimes, even if there was no useful advice to give, I saw that listening still helped.” 

-Sonia Sotomayor

 

The kettle hisses when she sets it on the stove top, water droplets sizzling against the filament. Shaky hands while filling it from the tap – a sign of grief, or fear, or both?

It’s so quiet. Dark outside, still; the early morning traffic spins on below, muted sounds swelling and dropping with the change of the lights, red to green and back. Sonia watches out the window as the sky lightens, listening with half an ear to the water heating and missing New York like a phantom limb. There’s something about returning to the place of your childhood for the apocalypse, she thinks with sharp black humor. Some animal instinct that cries out for home.

She hears the faint click of a door opening, closing. The shower starts. If only it were possible to wash the last day away so easily. If only they could just start over, do it again until things come out right.

The water boils with a sudden shriek, and Sonia turns her attention to it. Coffee in the French press and black tea for Elena. The ritual is calming.

 

“So,” Elena says as she comes into the kitchen. The word leads into silence. Her hair is damp from the shower, towel-tousled and spiky.

Her eyes look tired.

Sonia pushes the mug towards her, watches Elena take the cream out of the fridge, stir in the sugar. “Good morning,” she replies, finally. She’s opened the news on her phone once already since she woke up. The details are sitting like a lump of lead in her stomach. Elena will have done the same, of course, she knows that, but it’s still hard to say the words: the last step in making it real. “You saw?” Her voice stays level; she’s proud of that.

Elena lifts one shoulder very slightly, nods.

They’ve stood exactly like this a hundred times before, waking up to the new day with quiet companionship. It feels different this morning. Not the end of the world, but the end of a world, certainly; the details aren’t filled yet in but it’s clear enough, like a Polaroid she’d rather not develop but is powerless to stop.

Elena lifts her tea to her face. After she’s taken a sip, she leans back against the counter and contemplates the mug in her hands. “You know—” she says, and then pauses. The silence is heavy.

Outside the window, the day unfolds. No cartoonish dark clouds billowing in, nothing unusual for a day in November. Inside, the small, intimate tableau of breaking hearts. Elena shakes her head, once. When she looks up at Sonia, her eyes catch the low light spilling into the kitchen from the hallway, bright with the sheen of tears. “There’s so much. So many reasons to be—” She cuts off again, leaving Sonia to wonder what she meant to say. So many reasons to be hurt? Angry? Just plain sad? "And I know—” Elena continues, “I keep thinking of the Court, our work, of course,  but—” Her mouth is turned down, all the soft lines of her face telegraphing despondency. “I wanted—” The words keep getting stuck, and Sonia feels her own throat tightening in sympathy. “I wanted one of us to be in charge, you know? That hurts the worst.” A breath. “Or, no. Not worst. But sharpest, maybe.”

Sharp pin in a woman’s heart, the thought of what might have been. Sonia thinks then of Ruth: _when do you think it will be enough? When will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is when there are nine._

“I know,” she says, soft. What else is there to say? “Come here.”

Elena shakes her head again, but sets down her mug and crosses over the empty space between them. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” she whispers into Sonia’s neck, curving her body into Sonia’s arms. She smells like damp skin and flowers. She is warm and solid and Sonia holds her while her breath goes ragged and shuddery.

The floor is cold against her feet. Sonia closes her eyes and tries to hold the summer in her mind: visiting her place in New York, that handful of days they spent looking out across the Atlantic from the deck of the beach house, D.C.’s oppressive heat. Her thoughts keep stubbornly turning towards winter. Ice and grey slush and bitter winds, short days and long nights.

Time passes. Two minutes, five; Sonia’s thoughts skipping between the case law relevant to the work on her desk today, the election, the smell of her coffee, the woman in her arms. And then Elena sighs, a long, drawn-out breath, and steps away, closing herself back into her own space. “I was reading more Adrienne Rich this morning before I got up,” she says as she draws her hands over her eyes, smoothing herself back into place, the conversation sliding sideways into something new.

“Mmm.” It’s really morning now, outside. The world hasn’t stopped. They need to get moving, as impossible as it is to imagine going through a normal day of work.

“Yeah. Sometimes you just need the lesbian Jewish voice, you know? ‘But from here on, I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening.’”

Sonia tilts her head, considering. “Appropriate.”

Elena’s smile is small but real. “Very.”

 

They leave the condo separately, as always. Elena shouts her farewell while Sonia’s staring in the mirror above the bathroom sink, fiddling with the back of her earring. The door slams.

The poetry book is on the dresser. Sonia picks it up as she walks past, pauses, leafs through.

>   _And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds  
>  __break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,  
>  __and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms._

 

The grace of life is that you never know what’s going to happen, good or bad. Ten years ago no part of this day would have seemed possible. Sonia taps on the door frame and waits to enter until Elena looks up from her notes. “You want to go get lunch?” she asks, stepping inside. “My treat. Out in the city, somewhere.”

Elena smiles and sets down her pen, leaning back in her chair. “This day is looking up." They watch each other for a long moment. “What?” she asks, finally.

Sonia hesitates. It’s too revealing. Too vulnerable, too— something. “I want to go on from here with you,” she recites, eventually. The words are soft. Elena’s eyes go dark and shiny again. “Fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.”

There’s so much in the air between them. “What are we going to have instead?” Elena asks. “A career of—”

“Strength,” Sonia says. “Resistance.”

“Well then." They’ve always had steel in their bones. Sonia sees it in the way Elena sits back up, straightens her shoulders, lifts her chin. "You ready for this?”

Sonia nods. “Yes,” she says, because that’s the only answer there is.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains several bits of Adrienne Rich's poetry: two quotes from her "Twenty-One Love Poems" ("And my incurable anger...", "I want to go on from here with you..."), one from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties" ("But from here on, I want..."). 
> 
> Dear abluestocking,  
> I share your feelings of heartbreak & fear & devastation over the election. I hope this fic feels like a little candle of hope for you this Yuletide. <3


End file.
